Ottawa Sun Story:

Eve was working at a fast food restaurant when one of her "regulars" walked in.

It had been months since Eve escaped from two and a half years of sexual slavery -- sold to a dozen men a day, around the clock and through her period, every penny passed to her trafficker.

"I started hyperventilating. I just freaked out. Because I don't want anything to do with them and it brings flashbacks back," Eve, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, says of the encounter during a recent interview about her human trafficking case. "The feelings come flooding back in. Feeling scared. Feeling like I just want to get out of there. Nervous. Uncomfortable. Hurt."

Eve was 12 when she ran away from foster care and ended up in an escort agency. From agency to pimp to pimp she went until she met the man who pleaded guilty in May to trafficking her.

She speaks a little louder than she did six months ago, just three months out of the flesh trade then. And today her hair is yet another colour, yet another style.

Lots of changes since she was held up at gunpoint in that motel room just outside Toronto, a moment that jerked her past the threats of her trafficker and into a police station. She spent her 18th birthday in hiding, shuffled through jobs, got a place of her own and went back to school -- just 22 credits to go for her high school diploma. She wants to be a social worker.

Hers is the first human trafficking conviction in Canadian history. A ground-breaking case that didn't involve cross-border movement or a container ship of illegal aliens.

Hers is the story of a homegrown girl who, for two and a half years, gave out pleasure but received little in return -- against her will, desires and dreams, and amidst a sea of threats that if she left, he would get her.

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About 7,300 men caught trying to buy sex in Toronto have moved through John Fenn's classroom since he started a john school 13 years ago.

They are the fathers with baby seats and husbands of oblivious wives. Politicians and power-hungry Bay St. boys. Joe Blows.

And they are, Fenn has learned through this prostitution diversion program, either incredibly naive or blissfully ignorant.

"They believe that every girl's out there because she loves sex and they believe that all that money is theirs, that they don't give it away to anybody," Fenn says from behind his desk at Streetlights Support Services in downtown Toronto.

Sometimes Fenn doesn't even need to talk to the johns. Sometimes the ex-sex worker who has been trafficked through the United States and across Canada; or the cop who has interviewed the beaten and raped, crack-addicted women -- sometimes their stories are enough.

"Yeah sure, tell me a girl's got 50 holes up her arm and no teeth left and it's 3 o'clock in the morning on the worst night in the wintertime, that she loves sex to stand out there and do that. Come on, buddy. Get real," Fenn says. "She's out there because she needs to be out there. Not because she wants to be."

If it's against her will, why wouldn't she just run away? Some johns wonder. She insisted she was independent. Many do; some are. Even if she is only keeping a few bucks a trick, that's more than she'd be making in Moldova or Ukraine or, wherever she's from. It's still exploitation.

"They can give you every excuse there is, but once they get that girl in the car and they exchange that sex for money then it's a power trip," Fenn says. "It makes them feel like, 'I just bought somebody. I just got the sex act.'"

She made that choice.

"That kid did not make a choice. Not at 13," Fenn says. "You make the choice between a Coke or a Pepsi, that's the choice you make. The choice of whether I want a blue sweater or a green sweater."

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Hers is a self-deprecating story of the blame so many trafficking victims somehow turn inward.

"I'm not too happy with myself still," Eve says. "I just feel like every guy is out there to use me. I try to trust them, but I just can't because I just go back and I fall back and I go hide in that dark corner."

Eve was 12 when she decided to sell her body for what she naively thought would involve walking around in a sexy outfit. It was the choice of a child.

She held onto the fruitless promises of her trafficker -- that he loved her, that she would get braces one day, that he would let her go back to school.

She insisted to johns that she was independent, that her money was her own. Sometimes when she made these proclamations, her trafficker was hiding in the bathroom listening. Sometimes he wasn't.

Could she have been saved from the turnstile of men that moved through her motel cell?

It doesn't take long for Eve to answer that one. After all, she eventually went to police.

"I really don't think so," she says. "A lot of people are ignorant and a lot of people don't care."

"It's not fair when someone comes out and says, 'Hey, look what he's doing to me,' they just say, 'Oh well, you know, she's just another regular prostitute. Whatever, she likes being a slut.' They don't care."

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"The victims of human trafficking are like desert roses," Benjamin Santamaria says as rain pours down outside his modest office, set up on the second floor of an old Toronto house. "Beautiful souls, beautiful hearts in the desert, where there is nothing for them, like many youth or teens would say, in this cruel, cruel, lonely world."

Hence the name of the organization he set up to combat human trafficking: Project Desert Roses.

Some victims Santamaria has met arrive under these big city lights thinking, as artists like 50 Cent suggest, that it's cool to have a pimp.

Soon enough, they have one of their own.

He'll promise her love and riches. She'll buy it. He'll offer her drugs. She'll get hooked. Then there's no turning back, because a wasted teenaged girl is easy to manipulate.

Controlled, cheated and sold, the girls may not identify themselves as victims. They will be given little gifts here and there. Maybe go to Las Vegas to work for a while. They may think they are like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

"They see these guys like saviours. 'He's my john!' some of the girls say. Because he is their saviour in one way. He is saving them from the cruel, sad situation at home," Santamaria says. "They don't know they are changing one hell for another hell."

Dealing with human trafficking, he admits, isn't easy.

"Nobody wants to hear that the solution is we," he says. "There is no government that will stop human trafficking. There is no international agency who will stop human trafficking. There is no new Messiah who will come to stop trafficking, but we love to dream. And we love not to have personal responsibility."

Philosophically speaking, as Santamaria does, there would be no supply if not for demand. Sexual services are sold online and in the classified pages of local publications.

"Children and youth are learning that women are just a commodity, that I can buy them whenever I want. If I have $60, $80, I just go to the pages of NOW Magazine and I can find which I want: A black one, a blonde one, a Chinese, a Japanese woman for $60."

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Eve has a message for her trafficker. She apologizes for the words she has for him: "Go f--- yourself," she says, his name still inked into her skin. "I am at the point that I don't even need to tell him how I'm doing because I don't have any time to waste my breath."

The tables have certainly turned.

Now he is confined. He needs permission to use the phone. He is told what to wear, what to eat. And, if his victim gets her wish, he is being raped.

She doesn't think his sentence was tough enough: Three years for human trafficking, two for living off the avails of prostitution and possession of counterfeit mark.

"Once he gets out, he can move on with his life. I have to live with it everyday."

The only solace she takes from the situation is that every day her boyfriend-turned-pimp-turned-trafficker spends behind bars, it's another day he is forced to think about her.

"One day I'm going to meet that Prince Charming and he's going to be opening doors for me and giving me massages and pedicures," she says. "I'm going to get what I deserve."

Eve hopes that someday she will get past the flashbacks and the hurt that comes with them. She takes that dream one day at a time.

"Some days I wake up and I'm in the bathroom brushing my teeth and I look at myself and I'm like, I'm really happy. I'm blessed that I got the second chance. I'm blessed that I can go back to school. I'm blessed that I'm still alive. I'm blessed that I'm not a crackhead, you know? So yes, sometimes I'm really happy," she says. "But sometimes I'm really lonely and I'm sad and I just want someone to be there."

What total BS, media loves to glamorize the dark side of the trade. The story in it's self is sad and there are certainly way too many stories like Eve's and those who ply in the trade of human trafficking should be dealt with the strong arm of the law.

My problem is with the source, particularly in this case THE SUN. In my opinion this "media" outlet is just as guilty of living off the avails as a scumbag pimp or trafficker. If it weren't for the sex trade this paper could likely fold. With ad rates ranging between 200-600 a week those little classifieds sure do add up and add to the bottom line. They are enabling some of the lowlifes featured in the story printed in the very same paper to continue to do what they do.

I just find it hard to swallow to have the same paper editorially condemn something that they guilty of supporting. Just recently with all the MP busts in Gatineau, some of the very same addresses that were listed in the front pages and headlines were the very same businesses listed in the classifieds near the back. How two faced.

What total BS, media loves to glamorize the dark side of the trade. The story in it's self is sad and there are certainly way too many stories like Eve's and those who ply in the trade of human trafficking should be dealt with the strong arm of the law.

 

My problem is with the source, particularly in this case THE SUN. In my opinion this "media" outlet is just as guilty of living off the avails as a scumbag pimp or trafficker. If it weren't for the sex trade this paper could likely fold. With ad rates ranging between 200-600 a week those little classifieds sure do add up and add to the bottom line. They are enabling some of the lowlifes featured in the story printed in the very same paper to continue to do what they do.

 

I just find it hard to swallow to have the same paper editorially condemn something that they guilty of supporting. Just recently with all the MP busts in Gatineau, some of the very same addresses that were listed in the front pages and headlines were the very same businesses listed in the classifieds near the back. How two faced.

I have to agree CK. That paper has a whole classified section with respect to "Adult Entertainment" whereby significant daily revenue is generated. They definitely are two faced.